Mosses erode granite boulders into sand, acting as geologic agents

Evidence

The rocks are beyond slow, beyond strong, and yet yielding to a soft green breath as powerful as a glacier, the mosses wearing away their surfaces, grain by grain bringing them slowly back to sand. There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has been called the “dialectic of moss on stone—an interface of immensity and minuteness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yang.” The material and the spiritual live together here. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 56

Categorization

• CANDY: A soft green breath as powerful as a glacier — mosses as slow geologic force eroding rock to sand — is a compact, striking image for any conversation.
• XREF: This is the disturbance-history thread of the polyad: mosses read landscape change across glacial to human timescales, bridging to soundscape’s slow time and to trees-as-infrastructure’s agency scale-up.